There's Crickets in My Skull

A Chirping I Can't Kill

They’re real, they’re loud, they’re in my head. A poem born from sleepless nights and stubborn bugs. Annoyance and survival in one breath.

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The crickets skittered into my room tonight, uninvited guests with their ceaseless chirp, a chorus of tiny saws chopping through the dark. At first, I thought they’d perched on the windowsill, their brittle legs rubbing out a song to mock the stillness, but no—they’d burrowed deeper, past the walls, into the soft machinery of my consciousness. Chirp, chirp, ruthless, a sound that devours like rust eating through iron. I toss in bed, sheets tangling, annoyed at their audacity—how dare they claim this space, my silence, my fragile truce with the night?

Still, they linger, louder in my skull than in the air, a screeching swarm of thought I can’t quite smother. They chant of isolation, each shrill a faint reverberation ricocheting through the barren spaces where no one else sits, no voice but theirs to fill the void. I’m trapped with them, a captive audience to their endless recital, and I hate them for it—their whine a distraction, pulling me from sleep, from peace, from the dreams I whimper toward like a lifeline.

But then, a shift. Their chirping doesn’t stop—it digs in, roots itself like weeds through cracked stone. They’ve survived, these crickets, through frost and heat, through my grumbled curses and the sweep of my broom. They sing because they must, because the world keeps spinning, and so do they. And maybe I do, too. Annoyed, yes, lonely, sure—but still here, listening, breathing, stubborn as they are. The noise isn’t just torment; it’s proof—of them, of me. We persist, chirping through the cracks, a duet I didn’t ask for but can’t quite silence.

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